February 2011 Archives

With the clarity that hindsight, Openwave chief Ken Denman picks out the big talking points from this year's Mobile World Congress

As visitors headed home from MWC, exhibitors collapsed their stands and the people of Barcelona reclaimed their city, the trends, issues and conversations that will define Mobile World Congress 2011 are beginning to separate themselves from the deluge of news and debate.

The future of network operators is a question that seemed to puzzle customers, partners, press and analysts.

Clearly the industry sees voice and messaging revenues undergoing sustained decline in the coming years, which many expect will lead to tariff rebalancing, an issue which has been addressed by many of the show's exhibitors in keynotes and roundtable discussions. But mobile broadband continues to present an opportunity to the mobile ecosystem overall. The challenge for operators is how to monetize this opportunity.

As mentioned in my post earlier this week, many view industry collaboration as key to filling the "white space." I see a few cross-industry initiatives attempting to reinsert the mobile operator at the heart of the of the internet ecosystem. Whatever actions emerge from these efforts, operators must demonstrate that they can move faster than they have in the past to change the way in which they position their services.

Competition with the big Internet players is not yet on operators' radars; instead they are looking at points of differentiation. One attendee at an Openwave event summarized the prevalent concerns, and suggested that operators should instead seek to be 'supermarkets' using their assets as core enablers and providing customers with the proper infrastructure to exchange their information. These assets include management tools which aggregate index and sort apps and information.

With no clear shift expected soon, these are exactly the kinds of conversations MWC needs, and can facilitate. 2011 could be an important turning point for mobile operators, and with the various announcements at Mobile World Congress, they look ready to embark on a new era.

One sentiment I share with the majority of attendees is how exciting the mobile space is.

Onward.

It may have rained for most of the first day, but so far, Mobile World Congress has been anything but a wash out, writes Openwave chief executive Ken Denman

Official visitor numbers have yet to be announced, but the place seemed to be packed. The Openwave hospitality suite was filled with visitors all day as people stopped by talk, get product updates and see product demos.

The buzz, excitement and energy have been striking on a day when many attendees are usually still arriving.

Mobile World Congress is unique in the sense that it isn't just a sales platform. The annual event is an opportunity for everyone in the mobile industry, regardless of size, to come together and share ideas. How fitting then, that one of the key themes this year is collaboration.

Few can have missed hearing the news about Microsoft and Nokia last Friday in a deal that will see the two companies develop Nokia handsets based on the Windows Phone 7 platform. Whether you view the deal as a pragmatic move or as a desperate measure, that announcement has really set the tone for this year's show with conversations about its impact taking place all over the Fira.

I'm a firm believer that collaborating with other bodies within the ecosystem is essential for long term success. Today, we announced a partnership of our, an agreement with Juniper Networks to build a solution that will improve the delivery of video over mobile networks, integrates our own Media Optimizer into Juniper's Media Flow offering. 

With the growing demand for new business models to help drive up and downstream revenues, there needs to be a greater sense of overall collaboration within the entire mobile ecosystem, especially if operators are to reap the full rewards of effective mobile marketing campaigns and cross-sell opportunities. Whether or not they come to fruition, Mobile World Congress is the ideal breeding ground for these types of conversations. We're excited to see what the next few days will bring.

02 14 2011  Mobile World COngress Barcelona 

Openwave CEO Ken Denman is keeping a diary for us as he endures the marathon that is Mobile world Congress. In his first report, he predicts that this year's conference will divide exhibitors into three distinct camps.

As you read this, I'm my way to Barcelona for the most important week on the mobile industry's calendar: Mobile World Congress.

Three themes will occupy the business audience when they gather in Spain's culture capital.

As usual they are a mix of new issues and old concerns. There'll be plenty of airtime devoted to application development and distribution and the debates over new business models. Not forgetting the age-old problem of network congestion. With that in mind, I believe this year's key topics at Mobile World Congress 2011 will be:

1. Network congestion and control policies
As demand for rich mobile apps and services increases, operators will have to handle the traffic cost effectively. They might not face network outages yet, but shrinking margins are real. The rate of application development and the demand for mobile video will make this worse.

Signalling traffic - a consequence of the always-on mobile experience - is an issue that has received little attention, yet needs to be addressed with some urgency. This is the year when policy management and optimisation become crucial.

2. New business models will emerge
Mobile operators are sitting on a gold mine. They have valuable business insights that no one else has access to - such as subscriber data, location data, billing and payment information and network data - and they should be looking to up-sell and cross-sell services based on this personalised information.
They're not exploiting what they've got. Operator data provides deep insight into how mobile subscribers use and consume data services based on their existing data plans.

3. The browser will be the hot new app platform
For developers, a way to write apps once and run anywhere used to be the stuff of dreams, but as we embark on 2011, it's becoming a reality.
With HTML 5 implementations, the browser is increasingly consistent across all devices. For web content developers, this trend opens up a richer web application experience and a more open developer environment, and its impact will likely be significant.

A new class of content uses the browser as the platform for adding value to the user experience. As this becomes more widespread, it will create opportunities for mobile data services providers to design personalised and location-based content which operators can provide to end users via a floating toolbar across one's entire mobile experience.

Businesses that find their mobile calls dropping out are three times as likely to dump their operator. But that won't solve their problems. An S class femtocell from ip.access might!

Consumers can now guarantee their mobile will work at home or in the office, as they can get their own dedicated cell, giving them fantastic data speeds, for as little as £50.

In future it will be a platform for providing services, based on the fact that your mobile is in range of a home or office cell.

Ip.access can integrate with Facebook, ideal for getting an SMS when you arrive home. It can integrate with AlertMe too, giving the users remote control of lights and other devices at home.

The main selling point of this new S class femtocell is it avoids dropped calls, dead spots and slow data.

Mobile operators should make them available to their customers so that they can use their phones indoors, where the signal is often reduced by the walls of the building.

Femtocells are offered by mobile operators to their customers. In most cases the cost is between £50-100. But they are sometimes given away for free to selected customers.

AT&T has recently announced that they are offering selected customers they consider likely to benefit a few 3G microcell which is the ip.access design and delivered in partnership with Cisco.

In the latest of his series of briefings on IPv4 Jeff Smith, a strategist at Global Crossing, warns that the move to IPv6 will be less like a revolution and more like an evolution. 

Good news: migration to IPv6 isn't a massive task. Bad news: it's lots of little tasks.

Compensatory good news: You get the chance to tell your network manager to 'read the manual!'

OK, so IPv4 addresses are running out. What does this actually mean for businesses affected?

Well, there no big changes needed, but plenty of small ones, all that will need enormous attention to detail.

Still, this is a great time for users to get their own back on network managers. If they're not experts on IP6 then it's time to issue the time-honoured techie rejoinder. 

Read the manual! 

Once they have done that, they can start assessing the LAN, the routers and the carrier your company uses. 

But, before you do anything else, talk to your ISP and insist they assign you some IPv6 address space. 

Make sure your carrier can provide a dual stack connection. I've said this before, but it's a point worth repeating. A dual-stack network can route both IPv6 and IPv4 simultaneously, on the same network. So your internet connection has both paths. 

But once you have your new IPv6 addresses, the real work starts. First you must configure all routers to run IPv6. Some hardware does this automatically, but the chances are you'll need to do some manually. Once the LAN has been switched, move to your PCs and servers.

Most Windows Vista and Windows 7 PCs will have IPv6 as a default. But you may have turned it off for security reasons so now you need to turn it back on. Then you'll need to update your servers, databases and inter-machine communications.

Now comes the hardest part. Enabling IP phones, converged communications packages and video conferencing will be challenging. This IP-based hardware may not be IPv6-enabled by default, so you will have to ask the hardware or software vendor involved if they support IPv6 and when they plan to. Take a good book as you'll be on the phone for ages.

Think of the migration to IPv6 as an evolution rather than a revolution. All these small steps will make a big difference to the future availability of your IT and network services.

This lunch meeting is going well - because they're drinking Ketel One Vodka, a quality solution the steak holders will appreciate

 One of the the great unexamined business processes of British industry is alcohol consumption. It helps the techies think outside the box, it pacifies the angry footsoldiers of the sales army and it creates the right atmosphere for business lunches.

Most of the crucial deals in this industry are struck in bars and at restaurant tables. And yet, and yet. Many IT companies (and indeed publishers) skimp on the quality of the entertainment. This has to be a false economy.

You can't be a premium service provider and drink plonk. The message you're sending out is this: we deliver second rate alcohol solutions to the steak holder!

There's a productivity argument to be made here too. Premium brands of beer, wine and spirits are generally devoid of impurities. Which means you can drink a bottle of Ivan The Terrible Vodka and still be at work the next day. This column has actually tested this. Cheap booze contains hideous additives, that cause hangovers that drastically cut productivity for up to two days. Skimping on the refreshments, then, is a terrible false economy.

This is a business process we intend to investigate. Watch this space for a series of in depth investigations.

As any philosopher will tell you: the unexamined life is not worth living.

Where do you stand on this important issue? 

We've heard about mobiles that can get you in the mood for love...

Now scientists have found another step of the cycle that mobiles can measure.
Cambridge Temperature Concepts (CTC) has discovered that your mobile phone could be an aid to fertility. (No, you don't stick it down your trousers.)

CTC developed a new kind of wireless physiological monitor, which measures body temperature, heat flow and movement with unprecedented resolution.

The first application (DuoFertility) is in conception assistance for couples suffering infertility. But work is under way to apply this technique to sleep quality monitoring, hypoglycemia detection, infection control and a range of veterinary applications.

DuoFertility is a non-invasive, easy-to-use female fertility monitor. CTC says it's natural, convenient, and precise. It's the best way of maximising the chances of getting pregnant.

CTC was founded by graduate students at the University of Cambridge.

Well IP4 users are no different from those wildebeest. Like their four legged herbivorous counter parts, they know their address won't be viable for much longer. Comfortable though it is, for now, they must give up their home and embark on a long and ominous migration.

For the wildebeest, this means dragging themselves on an arduous and dangerous hike across the arid plains of the Serengetti, where they face all kinds of unpleasant predators. For IT managers, it's even worse, as the hyenas of the IP address market seek to pick off the herd's stragglers, the lionesses of the press seek to ambush them and the alligators of the corporate law firm seek to haul them into dangerous waters, gripping them in the teeth of a suffocating writ and dragging them into a pool of angry shareholders.

Needless to say the migration to IPv6 is no easy task, writes Jeff Smith, and it's one that organisations need to plan for carefully. Many enterprises and government agencies are delaying the inevitable by finding ways to stretch the usefulness of their existing networks as new IPv4-lengthening technologies arise. But the end of the road will eventually come, however, so what are the fatal traps you must never fall into?

Do your research when upgrading your equipment. This may sound like a no-brainer, but there are many hardware vendors out there that claim their hardware supports all the feature functionality of IPv6 when, in fact, they don't. Although the hardware works on an IPv6 network, it doesn't necessarily support all of the functionality of some IPv4 applications. If your organisation runs many rich applications and is hoping to run them on IPv6 this is an area that will need to be well researched. Otherwise, you could find yourself wandering around in circles, while the tsetse fly of undocumented network slowly eats nto your nervous system.

Avoid any network provider that doesn't operate a dual stack network. A dual-stack network has the ability to route IPv6 and IPv4 side by side on the network so that your wide area network or Internet connection behaves as an IPv4 and IPv6 path simultaneously. Network operators do this for their customers because it allows the customer to test a fully-functioning IPv6 implementation without turning off any of their old IPv4 setup. This also allows the customer to retain access to the parts of the Internet that have not yet transitioned to IPv6. While many providers offer a solution for tunneling IPv6 inside of IPv4, this convenient solution is best for getting initial experience with IPv6 and is less preferable to a dual-stack configuration for a final implementation of IPv6.

Remember, both of these situations can have business-impacting ramifications for some enterprises that are running applications that must work in the new IPv6 environment. Make sure you plan thoroughly. Or you could end up in the jaws of a dilemma!

We must switch to IPv6 before the last rew addresses of IPv4 are swallowed up by rampant global consumerism, says Jeff Smith, Global Crossing's senior director for infrastructure services

When the internet was built they were on version 4 of the Internet Protocol (IPv4). So you would have thought it would be fairly advanced and forward thinking.

But IP4 was designed to cater for only four billion addresses. Bill Gates has got more Facebook friends than that! But 30 years ago, when IPv4 was first introduced, this seemed more than enough for a store of addresses.

When the Internet metaphorically caught fire, all those addresses were soon burned up. In the early 1990s the Internet Engineering Task Force (the industry standards body) identified the problem.

Recognition blem is only half the battle, of course. Taking action is another story.

With over 70 per cent of available addresses assigned to North America, regional distribution was very poor. The soaring populations and economies of India and China exacerbated the problem as they placed enormous demand for Internet access and IPv4 addresses.
Meanwhile, the western world wanted more Internet-dependent devices than ever, a trend that was accelerated when everyone began buying smart phones in 2005.  Add in 4G wireless rollouts and it's no wonder that the end of the road for IPv4 is in sight.

Which would be OK, but people haven't migrated to more practical alternatives, such as IP6. Why? Because they're happy with IP4, for now. Some say widespread shift to IPv6 won't happen until the cost of running on IPv4 starts rising.

(This all sounds like global warming, only for IP addresses - Ed).

Governments are taking heed and have started to encourage the transition to IP6. The developing nations are leading the charge. The Chinese, Japanese and Korean governments have also championed the rollout. The US government forced contractors to government agencies to be IPv6-ready by the summer of 2008. The EU is reviewing methods to encourage adoption.

But with IPv4 addresses near exhausted, a resolution by all countries to require the migration to IPv6 must be reached sooner, rather than later. Are they doing enough?

Are we going to run out of time?

Tomorrow Jeff Smith will discuss the possible strategies to avert disaster and identify the IP-changer deniers who refuse to accept there's a problem.

The sky is about to fall in, the seas will boil and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, if we've interpreted a new report from Cambridge Broadband Networks accurately.
A bulletin, sent to this column, predicts that with global mobile data traffic set to grow 32-fold in the next four years, some operators will be on their knees by the end of the year.
"The operator with the greatest network capacity will have a distinct advantage and consumers will flock to them," warns Graham Peel, CEO of mobile network backhaul specialist Cambridge Broadband Networks.
Meanwhile some operators will have their heads in the sand, he says.
One possible way for averting this catastrophe would be to buy some network backhaul capacity. Cambridge Broadband Networks sells it.
Oh my god. Won't someone please think of the children? They're our future. For goodness sake, you operators, buy some network backhaul capacity. From a reputable Cambridge based supplier.
Peel has made some other predictions too. Not all of which dovetail with his company's marketing plans. Here they are, cut and paste in their entirety.

• The operators with the best network quality in 2010 will fall down the list in 2011 - their leadership will attract new data hungry customers but the additional data load will compromise the very network quality that attracted new subscribers in the first place.
• There will be further adoption of data offload strategies - via femtocells and wifi - but the compromises inherent in using third party networks will become obvious to operators and their customers.
• LTE adoption in the radio access network will accelerate - it has to!
• Fibre won't provide the answer for backhaul - speak to any mobile operator privately and they will tell you that fibre is either impractical or too expensive to comprehensively implement.
• Microwave, and particularly next generation microwave designed to handle the dynamic loads typical of mobile data use, will see even greater adoption throughout the world.
• There will be an 'AT&T experience' in the European market. At least one operator will be crippled by the data load and suffer massive churn as a result.

It's dreadful I know, but the column still gets lost in London and it's lived here forever.

You'll wander round Shoreditch for days, rather than bite the bullet and get out the A to Z, for fear of being identified as a tourist or, worse, a south Londoner. (Although a bad haircut and M&S suit should be a dead giveaway)

Online journey planners? They're hopeless once you've started your journey and the latest problem on the Bakerloo line has kicked in.

So thank goodness for Speak&Go London, a mobile app from Cheltenham-based Novauris Technologies. Before starting your public transport journey, you speak to your handset. Its voice recognition software lets you tell your iPhone or Android where you want to go (Clapham Junction to Canary Wharf) and your handset works out your best journey, taking into account all the latest strikes and leaves on the line.

It then tells you which lines to take, where to change, the times of the trains and the expected journey time. It even factors in the walking time! Superb. Nothing, not even the Docklands Light Railway or the Heathrow Express, can phase it. Speak&Go even knows 100 major landmarks, like the London Eye and the Eternal Roadworks at Waterloo Station.
the most valuable improvement in brings is it knows all the line closures and delays - unlike information intercom people at Clapham Junction.

You don't need to know this next bit. But here goes. It works by using  Novauris' automatic speech recognition. The smartphone displays the journey that it thinks it heard, together with some possible alternatives in case the top choice isn't right.  The user taps on the journey required and the app goes off to the Transport for London website to get the latest information on that journey.  The app then displays the information (see photo).

You don't have to type in your journey details using a virtual keyboard.  "Personally, I find them slow and irritating to use, even when it isn't cold," says creator Melvyn Hunt. "You can use this app while walking down the street without the risk of colliding with a lamp post."

Novauris hasn't launched it yet as a product, as they would prefer to sell through a third party. Here's your chance resellers!

As this is a great potential product for tourists, they are busy putting American accents into their speech recognition database.

They plan to include the locations of the various sports venues in time for London 2012.

Who can remember their passwords? Nobody. And yet IT security managers always insist on giving us a random, patternless string of alpha numerics to commit to memory.

One for each of the hundreds of systems we're forced to log into every day.

Small wonder that we waste many millions of pounds every year fiddling around and trying to remember our code or waiting for the support desk to respond.

It's long been established that humans remember shapes much more effectively. So why has it taken millions of wasted man hours for the IT industry to come up with the idea of pass pictures?

Still, let's not complain, we should be grateful to Stephen Howes, the Cambridge techie who can up with the idea of pass-pix. (Being a techie though, he's decided to categorise his invention as pattern based authentication. Fair trips off the tongue, doesn't it?)

It doesn't matter what you call it, Howes' GrIDsure products have made security access far easier and cheaper to manage. End users are presented with a grid of numbers, from which they choose the numbers that recreate the sequence of shapes that makes up their ID. This simple ID system can be used for one or two factor authentication , without the pain and the loss that are normally associated with this level of security.

The man is a genius! And so is the new CEO of the company, judging by his record. Daniel Mothersdale has worked his magic previously at Webroot, Brightmail and nCipher.
The product is brilliantly simple and effective. A trial with Credit Agricole was so successful (only two users out of 300 ever needed the help desk) that the bank has rolled out the system to 3000 users.

So now they are so busy they need resellers to sell this no-brainer into other corporations and public sector organisations. Better still, you can rebadge the software as your own.
Interested channel partners should contact Mothersdale at GrIDsure.

Farningham in Kent is the slowest village in Britain, in broadband terms, according to a judgemental study by Top10.com.

The village e-jits (slang for slow connectors) download at 1.30Mbps on average. So it would take 45 minutes to download the sound track to Midnight Cowboy and 12 hours to download the film.

Britain's digital divide needs addressing, according to Malcolm Corbett, CEO of the Independent Networks Co-operative Association (INCA).

"We're definitely in a country of haves and have nots," says Corbett. "Three million homes and businesses can't get a basic 2mbps service!"

Most grot spots are in rural areas which are already under economic and social pressure as local amenities close.

INCA is working with NYNet, alternative private sector players like Geo and even local communities like Alston in Cumbria to create 'Big Society Broadband'. They'd even work with BT if it meant bringing together public, private and community organisations working to extend coverage.

"Our first step has been to publish a guide for local project promoters - 'Beyond Broadband'. We are developing this into a comprehensive knowledge base to help people work out what is likely to work best in their area," says Corbett.

Another approach is taken by Deltenna. It has developed  a wireless Broadband Enabler (WiBE) device that creates a wifi hotspot over 3G in rural areas with no broadband coverage. This new start up claims it can deliver data throughput 30 times greater than a 3G USB dongle.

We're now down to the last 16 million addresses on IP4, according to Ovum. Which, in internet address space terms, is more or less scraping the barrel.

Despite all the warnings that have been given, many big companies and organisations have failed to act and could be caught out.

It's not as if nobody saw this coming, says analyst Craig Skinner, a senior consultant at Ovum. "Despite the plentiful predictions and warnings for some time that this point was approaching, some organisations will undoubtedly be caught by surprise," he says.

IPv6 addresses were designed to solve the problem of the predicted shortage of IPv4 addresses. But once again the IT industry has been guilty of taking the path of least resistance. "It has been easier to extend usage of IPv4 rather than undergo the challenge of transitioning to IPv6," laments Skinner.

When will the buffoons of the network industry ever learn?

(I'm not talking about you, obviously. It's those other plonkers.)